He hasn’t lost the swagger. Or the quick, encyclopedic mind. Whether you regard Keith Olbermann as a brilliant political thinker, a great sports analyst/trivia expert or an impossibly egotistical windbag, he’s never boring.

Talking to the TV critics confab in Beverly Hills on behalf of ESPN, the network he joined in 1992 and famously/contentiously left 16 years ago, in 1997, Olbermann opened by saying the New York Times got it wrong: “there is no such clause referring to content” preventing him from talking about politics in his new ESPN gig, as the Times reported, he said. “It is a sports show.” He hopes not to mention John Boehner’s name on the show, he said.

Of course he’ll talk about politics when it intersects with sports. Asked whether he’s constitutionally able to prevent himself from talking about politics, he countered, “It’s been wonderful not talking politics.” The MSNBC job “took a lot out of me.”

Here’s the closest he came to a mea culpa: “I’m 54 years old. If I haven’t figured out how much was my doing…my experiences have been much improved since I’m back.”

After putting “SportsCenter” on the map, then helping launch ESPN2, then jumping to MSNBC as the highly political host of “Countdown,” and seeing that relationship explode, then trying his hand at Current as a news managment executive as well as host, and seeing that one blow up, too, Olbermann is ready for his next act.

But wait! Having sworn off talking politics, he didn’t leave without addressing Anthony Weiner’s (latest) scandal. He successfully defused the loaded question. “I think he stole a great hotel sign-in name. The idea that anyone could call himself, for any reason and under any circumstance, “Carlos Danger”…”

Joanne Ostrow has been watching TV since before "reality" required quotation marks. "Hill Street Blues" was life-changing. If Dickens, Twain or Agatha Christie were alive today, they'd be writing for television. And proud of it.